class BinData::String

A String is a sequence of bytes. This is the same as strings in Ruby 1.8. The issue of character encoding is ignored by this class.

require 'bindata'

data = "abcdefghij"

obj = BinData::String.new(read_length: 5)
obj.read(data)
obj #=> "abcde"

obj = BinData::String.new(length: 6)
obj.read(data)
obj #=> "abcdef"
obj.assign("abcdefghij")
obj #=> "abcdef"
obj.assign("abcd")
obj #=> "abcd\000\000"

obj = BinData::String.new(length: 6, trim_padding: true)
obj.assign("abcd")
obj #=> "abcd"
obj.to_binary_s #=> "abcd\000\000"

obj = BinData::String.new(length: 6, pad_byte: 'A')
obj.assign("abcd")
obj #=> "abcdAA"
obj.to_binary_s #=> "abcdAA"

Parameters

String objects accept all the params that BinData::BasePrimitive does, as well as the following:

:read_length

The length in bytes to use when reading a value.

:length

The fixed length of the string. If a shorter string is set, it will be padded to this length.

:pad_byte

The byte to use when padding a string to a set length. Valid values are Integers and Strings of length 1. “0” is the default.

:pad_front

Signifies that the padding occurs at the front of the string rather than the end. Default is false.

:trim_padding

Boolean, default false. If set, value will return the value with all pad_bytes trimmed from the end of the string. The value will not be trimmed when writing.